Zimbabwe ejects UN crop survey team

The Zimbabwean government ordered a United Nations crop assessment team to leave the country over the weekend, days after the officials went into the fields to begin to calculate the annual food harvest.

The order effectively blocks UN and EU preparations to provide food aid reckoned to be needed for more than 5 million people later in the year.

The cancellation is believed to have been ordered because President Robert Mugabe's government did not want the UN team to gather figures showing that harvests would fall far short of the country's food requirements.

The agriculture minister, Joseph Made, said the UN team was in the country without his approval. But the Guardian has seen a letter dated March 30 from Mr Made's ministry inviting UN World Food Programme officials to estimate the country's food aid needs.

Independent agricultural experts warn that another year of serious food shortages looms after the precipitous drop in production caused by the government's land seizures.

An impending "famine" is how Zimbabwe's food situation is described by the German-based Friedrich Ebert foundation, which conducted an extensive crop survey in March.

The government, however, estimates Zimbabwe will pro duce a bumper harvest of 1.7m tonnes of maize this year. UN officials dismiss the government's estimate as "impossible" and "a fantasy".

"The government does not want to admit that its land grab has been a disaster and that Zimbabwe can no longer produce enough food to feed itself," said a political scientist, John Makumbe, the chairman of the Zimbabwe branch of Transparency International.

Opposition politicians charge that the government intends to use the food shortages to its political advantage in the parliamentary elections scheduled for next March. They say that the government plans to buy votes with food and will starve areas where there is strong opposition.

The elections will take place at the height of Zimbabwe's "lean season" when the rural population is between harvests and short of food.

Agricultural experts in Zimbabwe confirm that despite good rains this year the maize crop will not be nearly enough to feed the country's 12 million people.

They say much of the land seized from white commercial farmers over the past four years is lying fallow. A further problem has been the government's failure to provide adequate seed and fertiliser to small-scale black farmers. As a result Zimbabwe will need to import as much as 900,000 tonnes of grain, and an estimated 5 million people will need food aid.